Centennial, it
might be supposed that its life thenceforth would be one of peace and
pleasantness. But as this is history, and not fancy, there must be
set down the very surprising fact that the young newcomer received no
welcome and no notice from the great business world. "It is a scientific
toy," said the men of trade and commerce. "It is an interesting
instrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; but
it can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to put
a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory."

Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of
ridicule. He was an "impostor," a "ventriloquist," a "crank who says
he can talk through a wire." The London Times alluded pompously to the
telephone as the latest American humbug, and gave many profound reasons
why speech could not be sent over a wire, because of the intermittent
nature of the electric current. Almost all electricians--the men who
were supposed to know--pronounced the telephone an impossible thing; and
those who did not openly declare it to be a hoax, believed that Bell had
stumbled upon some freakish use of electricity, which could never be of
any practical value.

Even though he came late in the succession of inventors, Bell had to run
the gantlet of scoffing and adversity. By the reception that the public
gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose first
sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first
reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow,
and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a
nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad
freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a
fool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind."

The very idea of talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and
extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer
and the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was too freakish, too
bizarre, to be used outside of the laboratory and the museum. No one,
literally, could understand how it worked; and the only man who offered
a clear solution of the mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained
that there was "a hole through the middle of the wire."

People who talked for the first time into a telephone box had a sort of
stage fright. They felt foolish. To do so seemed an